Rambling about curiosity
I was thinking about curiosity the other day, so now you have to suffer through my rambling thoughts. What brought it to mind was a couple of conversations I’ve had with people recently, where they exhibited a distinct lack of curiosity. I have some sympathy with this because, being rather socially awkward, I have failed to show appropriate curiosity about something someone was interested in. Not through an actual lack of interest, but more through an inability to have grasped how the mechanics of conversations work. So maybe the people I was having dialogue with had a similar issue. Or they just weren’t interested.
One of the things I have developed as I’ve gotten older though is the skill at showing curiosity. I also think since I’ve leant into being a fiction-writer more, it has grown. I’m interested in all of the small details of how things work, what is it like to do a particular job or the lingo a person might use.
Curiosity is not always welcome though, and it can quickly slide into intrusiveness. Not everything is your business. In fact, most things aren’t. Context matters. For example “where are you from?” at a conference is an acceptable opening but as Afua Hirsch highlights, someone saying it to you just because you’re not white, it’s about othering someone. So, curiosity is appropriate where the other person gives you an invitation to express it. And then it can be seen as a gift, taking time to find out something about someone.
I was also reflecting on curiosity as it relates to personal tastes, particularly as one ages. I used to be quite snobbish about literature, for example. It had to be proper literary fiction, not genre material. This meant I often read “challenging” or “difficult” books. The same goes for movies. I am more comfortable now with just enjoying stuff, which is great and makes me much less annoying. But I wonder if there is a consequent slide into consuming “comfortable” media only.
One area where I have maintained curiosity I feel, is in music. I know a lot of people for whom music tastes essentially ossified in the 90s. I get it, maintaining interest in any field requires time and effort. When my daughter was young I was too busy with school runs, fitting in work, making dragons from egg cartons and trying to find a suitable outfit for World Book Day to really pay attention to new music. It’s a luxury. It is also one of those things that requires a significant initial momentum when you’ve stopped, but then becomes self-reinforcing as algorithms, and artists come to your attention. There is as much good music released today as there was when I was a teenager, and all those Facebook posts about “weren’t the eighties great?” are wilfully ignoring the success of Tight Fit or Jimmy Savile hosting TOTP.
Which then brought me on to considering the relationship between curiosity (or lack of) and nostalgia. Umberto Eco identifies the cult of tradition and a rejection of modernism as characteristics of fascism. And I think this “everything was better in the [insert decade of choice]” attitude is closely related to right wing politics. I can’t remember where I read a quote along the lines of “fascism is nostalgia for a past that never existed” but it has the ring of truth. To be clear I’m not saying that if you think all good music stopped with Oasis then you’re a fascist, but I would wager that there’s a reasonable (but not total!) Venn diagram intersection between people who think that and who vote Reform.
No real conclusion here I suspect, but as you get older maybe curiosity is like strength training, one of those things you should take time to explicitly develop.
[Photo by Joakim Honkasalo on Unsplash]
